


and here i dreamt

by ohwhatagloomyshow



Category: The Book Thief - Markus Zusak
Genre: F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-09
Updated: 2013-12-09
Packaged: 2018-01-04 04:19:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,121
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1076450
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ohwhatagloomyshow/pseuds/ohwhatagloomyshow
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>post-book, based on The Decemberists' song, "Here I Dreamt I Was An Architect." underage in the beginning, references to alcohol, depression, suicide, and PTSD, and the fic is not in strict chronological order.</p>
            </blockquote>





	and here i dreamt

and just to lay with you  
there’s nothing that I wouldn’t do  
‘cept lay my rifle down

She needed a lover without edges. 

That much was clear, when she took him to bed the first time, all empty hands and broken heart. He had never known a woman’s body before, and she had never known a man’s, so most of it was fumbling, rough and uncomfortable as he learned his way around her curves, as starving as they were. She tore her skin on the sharp angles of his hips and the bluntness of his ribs. But his heart was beating beneath his chest, and even as she ached lying at his side, there was a hand to hold in the darkness.

He gave her everything he had, but that wasn’t much. He gave her the nightmares that woke them up in the middle of the night; he gave her shivers and shakes at no provocation. He gave her stony silences. He gave her his refusal to let his guard down, finding alcohol easier to telling her the memories.

She was almost eighteen when he stumbled into the mayor’s home, drunk and calling her name. She ran down those grand steps, fumbling to close her robe and cursing at him to quiet down, did he want them to hear? until she almost screamed at his bloody lip and bruising eye in the soft hallway light.

“What in _hell_ happened?” she hissed, pulling him into the kitchen to get a better look and a clean washcloth. He couldn’t stop laughing.

“I fought,” he said, in a tone that implied how, literally, bloody obvious the truth was. “It was—“ He winced when she pressed a cold cloth, too hard, to his split eyebrow. He sucked in air between his teeth. “It was incredible.”

“You’re drunk.” Her tone was distasteful, but could he have expected anything else from her?

The shrug grew on his shoulders. “What else am I good for?”

He slept on the floor before her room, and it was more than he deserved when she treated his headache the next morning.

It amazed him, that she continued to show her vulnerable sides to him. She cried before him, shared her dreams and her nightmares, told him of her kiss on Rudy’s lips. But he was steel—brittle and shaking but steel as he answered her confessions with stony reserve. She left him speechless—she and her humanity. He couldn’t seem to pull his barriers down.

That moral vacuum had sucked him dry, and he felt himself return to the birdman, more Other than human.

Sometimes, the feathers turned to twigs again, but she washed them away.

Early in 1947 he finally drew the line. “I can’t do this anymore, Liesel.” It crushed whatever was left of him to say the words, and she accepted them in silence, walking along the riverbank. “You deserve better than me. You should get more than I can give you.”

She studied him for a long time.

“Everything you give me is everything I need.”

She was too good for him, so he found the strength to turn away.

and I am nothing of a builder  
but here I dreamt I was an architect  
and I built this balustrade  
to keep you home to keep you safe  
from the outside world

It was 1941 and he stood in Hans Hubermann’s hallway, a strange enough occurrence, until he was hugged with twelve year old arms, and then it became unbelievable. 

In his panic, he went over his possessions in a desperate effort to give her something—he owed her everything, after all, as a member of the Hubermann household. All he had were his clothes (necessary for the winter months and inappropriate for a girl her size) and rusty scissors. 

_Mein Kampf_ crossed his mine for one horrifying second.

_Like the lamb handing the knife to the butcher._

Her hands released him, and his fingers loosened from her shoulder blades, and he thought,

Well, she’s going to find out anyway.

Somehow.

When all of this is over.

If it ever ends.

He lay awake for a very long time, on the thin mattress with the drop sheets around his legs. _Mein Kampf_ was held lightly in his hands as it rested on his stomach. He closed his eyes, and thought.

_The mightiest counterpart to the Aryan is represented by the Jew._

She’s going to find out anyway.

_Here again the Jew is led by nothing but the naked egoism of the individual._

Somehow.

His fingers tightened automatically around the woven cover when he realized.

 _I’ll_ tell her about it.

I’ll tell her everything.

But in my own way.

He had pictured creamy white painted-over pages, but with the antisemitism bubbling up and sometimes visible, he thought it worked out better that way.  


but the angles and the corners  
even though my work is unparalleled  
they never seemed to meet  
destruction fell about our feet  
and we were free to go

He watched the realization dawn on her face as she risked her life in the river of Jews to touch her soft palm to the growing beard. 

I’m so sorry, Liesel, he wanted to say. I tried to keep this from you.

~

He forgot himself in that warm library—after making a round, touching the gilded spines and breathing in that literary air, he pulled at the hem of his sweater. With his back to the door, the wool pulled his undershirt up as he tugged it up his shoulders and over his head. The breeze from the open window was sweet across his warm back—

There was the clattering of china as it crashed to the ground, at the same time of a strangled cry from her sixteen year old throat. He shot around, newly freed from the sweater, undershirt halfway up his chest.

She stared in the doorway before the destruction of a tray of broken porcelain, tea pooling at her fine buckled shoes. Both hands were at her mouth and she looked as though she was about to heave.

He had forgotten about the whip marks.

~

She handed him the book, silently, as he warmed soup at the stove. Curious, he picked up the slim woven novella, and opened it to the first page. He snorted, and put the book down.

“I can’t read French,” he softly reminded her, and she relaxed beside him, with her back against the counter, elbows on the surface. He loved the curve of her body from that angle, gentle and softened from childbirth, in complete contrast with the hardness of her expression.

“It’s a memoir,” she explained, in a very quiet voice, “about the Holocaust.”

“Oh?” It was a feigned interest—regardless of what she had to say, he did not want to hear it, and did not want to hear _this._ He stirred the soup and tasted it for something to do.

“You need to tell your story, Max.” Like edges. “It’s eating you up.”

“Is it?” He ladled out a bowl for himself—much too soon, the liquid was lukewarm, but he was desperate to get out of this conversation, in any way he could.

“Yes.” She doubled her step to catch up with him, and blocked the narrow hall before he could make it to the safety of their bedroom with its lockable door. “You’ve never spoken about it.”

“You think I want to?” He fired it back.

“It’s killing you to _not_!” Her voice was desperate in its shout. “Write it out, Max! Write it down! You’ve been keeping it from me, fine, whatever—you’ve been trying to protect me for thirteen years like I’m still a child—go on, _keep_ your secrets, but at least _write them out_. Do it for yourself, if you won’t do it for me.” She forced her way through and nearly disrupted the soup in his hands.

That evening, he bruised his fingers against the old typewriter, and left the first thirty pages on her bedside table. He did not sleep, walked around the Anzac soccer field smoking his way through two packs before he could bring himself to return home.

She didn’t speak when he entered the bedroom, the new dawn beginning to creep through the window. He ran a hand through his hair, fidgeting, kicking off his shoes. “I haven’t finished it yet.”

She only nodded. He watched her, intently, until she finished, placing the last page on her lap. She sighed, closed her eyes, pressed her palms into the hollows for a terrifyingly long time. He almost touched her in his desire to see her move again.

Her eyes were red and irritated when she removed her hands. She looked at him, oddly at ease.

“Hi, Max,” she offered, and he accepted it with a smile. “Hi, Liesel.”

countess and courtesan  
have fallen ‘neath my tender hand  
when their husbands were not around

He realized he had no idea what her name was when he bit into her neck the moment before orgasm. She gasped at it, her nails digging blissfully, painfully into the small of his back, and he came. She came only when he put his hand between her legs, sopping and open, a few minutes later. It brought her arching up, gasping for breath, and as her body pulled itself up he noticed that there was too much flesh on her ribs. 

She held onto him as she fell asleep, a finger tracing the whip’s scar along his neck until it dripped away, limp with unconsciousness. He was rather quick to push away the black-haired woman once her breathing regulated.

He pulled on his jeans to stand at the window and smoked steadily through four cigarettes. His mind was blissfully free, his shoulders unknotted and knees still shaking, but there was a feeling of unease that remained in the back of his mind.

He struck a few matches and burned his fingers on the flames.

There were pieces of guilt that this was his sixth woman in as many weeks—he’s lost count of the women he’s known this year alone. They were easy to pick up, with his feathered hair in his eyes and cigarette between his full lips. More often than not his eyes were blackened after anonymous drunken fights, his hands chapped and bloody. He made an intriguing figure in darkened bars, and the women were entranced.

They were lonely, like him.

They all fooled themselves into thinking that this is it, here they are, I will find what I’m looking for between their legs.

That was never the case, for him or the women, but it kept his bed warm and made him a better lover for the next time. The emptiness remained.

Because he was the last one of his family standing, and he did not know why.

Because he went back to 8 Grande Strasse and she was done waiting for him—she had gone, the mayor’s wife said, to Australia. He did not have enough money for Australia.

So, he picked up the lonely women in bars and believed, every time, that he would find himself in them.

There is a piece, locked away, that knows he’ll only find himself again in those word-shaking hands.

and we are vagabonds  
we travel without seatbelts on  
we live this close to death

He thought only Death has seen more corpses than he had. 

(He’s half-right.)

She was afraid to love again after Himmel Street.

(She did so anyway, in spite of herself. It resulted in three children before her husband left her, too, dying in a mundane car crash after six years.)

He tried to drink himself into his grave an evening in November but panicked (someone upstairs began to play an accordion and he thought he was in heaven) and forced himself to vomit after the last shot.

She walked into the Sydney surf four days after her husband’s funeral, and the moment when the tide took over her instincts kicked in, and she shoved her way back to shore. She lay on the coast until the sun came up, and, covered in sand and dripping hair, she walked seven miles back to three hungry young mouths.

guess it’s better to turn this way

For weeks he had planned the perfect reunion speech, with fresh roses in his hand. Beginning with an apology, probably a sob, and a confession of his love for her. 

But when she opened the door, hair frizzed around her tired and worn face, looking so much older than the last time he saw her just eight years ago, he said the only thing he knew to be true.

“I need you.”

**Author's Note:**

> "Like the lamb handing the knife to the butcher" is a direct quote. "The mightiest counterpart to the Aryan is represented by the Jew" and "Here again the Jew is led by nothing but the naked egoism of the individual" are direct quotes from Mein Kampf. The memoir Liesel mentions is Elie Wiesel's "Night," which was published in French in 1958.


End file.
